Professional product reviewer

Amazon Rank

What is Amazon Reviewer Ranking? It is the system that Amazon ranks its reviewing customers with, the best reviewers presumably have a higher ranking. No one is exactly sure the algorithms that govern it, but here is what Amazon says. Everyone who has put a product review on Amazon has a ranking. To find out yours go to your profile page on Amazon you should have the ranking listed there. This is how Amazon stacks you up against their other reviewers on the site.

There are badges associated with Amazon reviewer rank. Badges do not come into play until you have reached a high level of reviewing. That can be achieved either by writing a lot of reviews over time which get tagged as helpful, or having just a few very popular (almost viral) reviews on products a large section of people want to buy – for instance the latest tech gadgets. People are reading those sorts of reviews closely to see if they should purchase, and a good review there will really boost your rank. In order to have a high ranking though, you need to be able to write those reviews so that people find them useful.

One thing I really like about Amazon’s ranking system is that “fan votes” are not counted towards rank. This means that even the little guy with not a lot of connections gets a fair shake. I am not sure exactly how fan votes are determined, for instance if the same person up votes you twice – does that mean they have become a fan? This part is not clear to me.

I have noticed that as my own reviewer ranking climbs, so does the number of solicitations for reviews I get. I was reviewing only for Amazon Vine and Walmart previously, but when my ranking climbed up to around 2,000 that was when I started getting solicitations from private companies for reviews, and the higher my ranking climbs – the more requests I receive.

If you are not currently a reviewer, and you are wanting to get into it you should definitely include contact information on your Amazon profile, and any profile you review on. There are some people who think that is a bad idea, because you will get emails from every Tom, Dick and Harry… but my personal experience has not been negative.

Interested in knowing more about top ranking reviewers? Amazon does have a forum for top reviewers. Some of the information there is useful, some of it not – but always interesting reading.